Gadda (Piccola biblioteca Einaudi Vol. 559) (Italian Edition)

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Il primo capitolo si sofferma su Trissino, Machiavelli e Tolomei. Italian Bookshelf della cultura nazionale. Sulla scia di Thomas M. Green, Mongiat Farina sottolinea come i giochi scartati abbiano come obiettivo la conoscenza, al contrario di quello prescelto che propone un percorso di formazione. Nature and Art in Dante: Literary and Theological Essays. Four Courts Press, The essays published in this collection, originally delivered in the context of the annual Dante Series at the University of Dublin in and , represent a valuable contribution to the study of the crucial and complex issues of nature and art in Dante.

As one understands from the subtitle of the volume, Literary and Theological Essays, these issues are explored in an interdisciplinary perspective that does not include only literature and theology but also the visual arts and philosophy. Two of these essays are particularly important in clarifying the two themes at the center of the volume. In this sense the term is close to the concept of art in ancient philosophy where it was related to planned practical skills.

On the one hand, artista may allude to an artisan or craftsman as in Paradiso Finally, arte for Dante implies skills and techniques that the artist must master, and is not opposed to science or nature; above all it points beyond itself, to a world of values that create its dignity. The second essay that plays an important role in elucidating the two major topics at the center of the volume is Simon A.

In this sense the cosmos is the Book of God through which humans may apprehend the divine artificer behind it. This vision of nature had ancient roots and was developed particularly by twelfth- century theology. Italian Bookshelf philosophical and appears related above all to the recovery and reception of Aristotle and his Arab and Latin commentators. This hierarchy is confirmed in the extended literary description of the visual arts of Purgatorio where God is the artificer of the engravings, superior to all human artists and natural realities. However, Dante conceives nature as closely linked to the planets and their angelic movers.

The other essays in the collections contribute in different ways to the general theme of the volume. In this sense Dante becomes a combination of Aeneas and Paul, a hero and a poet-prophet. Italian Bookshelf Silent Ship: In conclusion, the volume Nature and Art in Dante is an important addition to the bibliography on these themes. Prefazione di Mario Praz. Biblioteca di Lettere Italiane, Studi e Testi.

Italian Bookshelf del Lomazzo E non meno, e proprio per questa coscienza, la lezione di Tasso rimane preziosa, e maturo compimento del secolo XVI: A cura di Marco Petoletti. The Renaissance from an Italian Perspective: An Anthology of Essays In the introduction to The Renaissance from an Italian Perspective: An Anthology of Essays , editor Rocco Rubini enumerates his motivations and criteria for compiling this collection of essays. How have these matters been complicated by developments in politics, philosophy, history, culture and society? Can we say today that these complexities have been resolved?

These are but a few of the penetrating questions with which one must grapple in dealing with these essays. Each essay is densely laden with social and historical implications, and rife with value judgments and sharp critiques. Because the Renaissance failed to produce political autonomy for Italy, and was followed instead by a period marked by foreign domination and historical decline, it could not represent for the Italian consciousness a moment of unqualified progress despite the advances it heralded.

As Dionisotti points out: Characterized by a sense of urgency and moral certitude, the writings of Spaventa, De Sanctis and Fiorentino represent the period of the late Risorgimento. Spaventa calls for a new system of learning, and De Sanctis rejects the Renaissance intellectual. The next generation of scholars who carry the torch of their predecessors is represented by Gentile and Croce.

Grassi, Garin and Cantimori provide the post- war perspective, characterized by a reappraisal of the role and influence of Renaissance humanism. For them, humanist thought and method are essential to the development of modern sensibilities and civilization. It is his thesis that all academic and scientific endeavors are outgrowths of humanism. The epilogue to the volume comes from Dionisotti and returns to the issues initially raised in the introduction. He points out the role that history has played in the shifting relationship between Italian scholarship and the Renaissance.

According to Rubini, however, there is knowledge to be gleaned from the contributions of scholars such as De Sanctis, and value to be gained from continuing to include their considerations in discussions of the Renaissance. Italian Bookshelf This volume is a testament to the ongoing dialogue that exists between the past and present, as modern Renaissance scholars continue to puzzle their way through matters of national identity and philosophy, ever plagued by questions of historical subjectivity. How can any scholar look upon history with an unbiased eye, without seeing his or her own world view reflected at any given moment in time?

Rather than offer an exposition on Italian Renaissance scholarship, it, instead, poses a challenge to future generations to find their own place within the dialogue begun over a century ago. Scholars must strive to answer the questions which inevitably arise from the consideration of texts such as these, and in so doing approach a better understanding of themselves and their own influences, as well as those of the thinkers who came before. Representation, Self-Representation, and Agency in the Renaissance. Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, This volume of eleven papers by as many scholars spans four centuries and several countries, including England, Spain, France, and Italy.

The first four essays, as well as the eighth, focus on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France: Essays five and six are set in England: Archival documents, Brizio claims, reflect real-life practices more accurately than statutes and other normative literature commonly examined by historians; through a careful reading of these newly analyzed documents primarily, notarial records , Brizio shows the extent of the autonomy and economic freedom enjoyed by Sienese women in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries — much greater than, for example, the autonomy of their Florentine counterparts.

My two main critiques, however, are addressed to the press the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies in Toronto , and not to the generally thoughtful, original, and well researched essays themselves. First of all, readers will wish that the manuscript revision had been more thorough: The binding, as well, should have been done better: That said, there is much to recommend this eclectic book to scholars — both historians and literary critics — working on, or interested in learning more about, the representation of women in early modern Europe.

Michele Marrapodi has been writing about English and Italian cultural relations since the s. This most recent volume, which he has edited with his usual care, consists of eighteen essays by scholars whose concerns go beyond the identification of borrowed sources. The Merchant seems to have been conceived with precisely such an idea in mind. At the core of her thesis is the Italian term riconoscenza gratitude , which shares a root with riconoscere to recognize: This notion sheds light on the strange and chilling moment when Coriolanus forgets the name of a poor Volscian who has given him aid.

The moment seems trivial but it foreshadows what will happen to Coriolanus at the end, when he cannot bring himself to utter his own name, the name he has earned in battle at Corioles, upon entering the home of the arch enemy Aufidius. In that home, of course, there will be no riconoscenza for Coriolanus. The danger, of course, in setting out to discover evidence of political engagement is to see such evidence where perhaps it does not exist. Horatio Palavicino was not only a merchant and a politician but apparently also a whoremonger.

Italian Bookshelf contribution to our understanding of the way in which Shakespeare read and responded to his Italian predecessors. Poetry and Identity in Quattrocento Naples. La posizione del poeta si manifesta nelle caratteristiche formali e contenutistiche delle opere, denotanti vari gradi di capitale culturale. Nei primi tre capitoli Soranzo esamina il Parthenopeus e De amore coniugali tramite i vari fili che legano le opere al loro contesto discorsivo, delineando come Pontano negozia le proprie origini umbre e la sua assimilazione della cultura aristocratica napoletana.

Spostatosi lo sguardo al campo della filosofia e della religione, il quinto capitolo esamina la rinegoziazione del proprio carisma da parte di Pontano dopo la caduta della dinastia aragonese. Italian Bookshelf Chris Wickham. Sleepwalking into a New World: Princeton University Press, Students of Italian literature typically encounter the history of Italy at the time of the rise of vernacular literary records, around the mid-thirteenth century. The relationship between urban life and literary production is already something of a given by that time; indeed, in De vulgari eloquentia Dante maps the various vernaculars of northern Italy on an urban grid.

The governmental model associated with these cities, that of the commune, is likewise in place, so the question of how the commune was born does not seep into literary studies. It turns out, however, that the commune has a fascinating history and an impressive documentary record, now mediated by Chris Wickham in this excellent book.

The author devotes a chapter each to Milan, Pisa, and Rome, as well as one to a review of several other cities that furnish further comparisons to the three principals. The makers of the commune did not partake of the sort of self-aware constitutionalism we see elsewhere; rather, they more or less stumbled upon their new government.

All of the communes he studies share most if not all of these elements, allowing Wickham to demonstrate that despite their sleepwalking the inventors of the commune were all pretty much up to the same thing. Moreover, just as Wickham describes an ideal-type commune, so too does his history record a more or less consistent set of conditions that allow the commune to emerge.

First and foremost there is the above-mentioned weakening of the old order: Important too is an older tradition of urban assemblies, such as the Milanese collectio, that morphed into the consulatus or concio, an organized urban deliberative body. Italian Bookshelf in the law. With economic interests to protect, these men sought compromise with fellow citizens to ensure urban stability, applying their collective knowledge and energies to the protection of the city from external and internal threats. At the same time, however, one can see how the presence of multiple landholders in and around urban areas would encourage the sort of dialogue that would aim to preserve property rights and limit encroachment.

Wickham is a cautiously speculative historian; he hews to his documents, allowing them to tell only as much of the story as they can tell. One effect of the political somnambulism that Wickham describes is that the lack of self-awareness about the changes being effected left a hole in the historical record: Students of medieval Italian literature will find a fascinating secondary narrative here as well.

Wickham mentions a number of historical poems from Milan and Pisa, written in Latin. On the cusp of the emergence of a vernacular literature, therefore, there existed a late-Latin literary tradition, one that would overlap with vernacular production later on. This study begs one question and answers another. The former has to do with why the commune emerged at roughly the same time in so many places. Wickham furnishes some answers, but there is no reason to assume that common conditions would give rise so consistently to the commune.

Some of the answers may have to do with imitation, as word spread throughout the region about the emergent governmental structures. As well, the shifting economic landscape associated with urban life appears to have played a role, with wealthy stakeholders aiming to protect their property rights and enforce the responsibilities of members of the community as a means to guarantee a stability seen as good for all. The second question, the one Wickham answers more adamantly, goes to why he writes this book in the first place, and it is related to the first.

Wickham insists that a teleological reading of the history of the commune is thoroughly unfounded, precisely because its inventors basically had no idea what they were producing as they made it. There is no destiny here, but a haphazard and luckily successful attempt to create an urban governmental structure that in theory would guarantee peace. That peace turned out to be a chimera, as for example in Florence, reflects perhaps a human nature that no government can fully mediate.

Michael Sherberg, Washington University in St.

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Italian Bookshelf Jan M. That is not to suggest, though, that this collection of essays discourages new queries in its wake. In the introduction, Ziolkowski stages a rousing lineup of academically provocative and politically relevant questions and paradoxes. On the political front he demonstrates how despite the fact that the Commedia is an exemplum of what is Western, Christian and Catholic, and although it was written some seven hundred years ago, what it says about Islam has become nonetheless intensely relevant. Since then the Union of Italian Muslims has also appealed to the Pope to remove such artwork from churches as well as to withdraw the teaching of the Commedia from curricula in densely immigrant regions of Italy.

On the academic front, tensions run even deeper. On the one hand a picture arises of what medieval Christendom had the potential to know about the world of medieval Islam and how Dante then presumably absorbed and redirected this knowledge. On the other hand we see how modern academics have aligned themselves to this development. The twelve articles in this volume are grouped into five categories, reflecting inquiry and insight along varied sight lines.

Burman, examines different kinds of attitudes toward and knowledge about medieval Islamic texts and culture from the perspective of medieval Christian scholars, examining specific translations, translators and their particular bents and biases. Stone and Daniela Boccassini, and uses textual evidence from the Commedia to argue for connections between Dante and Islamic philosophical and literary traditions.

In the first article the connection is drawn in terms of how allegory and metaphoric language integrate philosophy and theology in Dante as was done in earlier Islamic writings Schildgen. The second article suggests a link in the way intellect in the Commedia could be read as philosophically divisible into the practical and theoretical, and how this idea might reflect Islamic thinking Stone. The last article discusses how the phenomenology of falconry in the Commedia can be linked to none other than an Islamic cultural heritage Boccassini.

Italian Bookshelf inquiry to create space for a world that thinks, asks thoughtful questions of the other and listens in pursuit of the truth. This volume belongs on the shelves of Dantists and Islamic scholars alike and will appeal to those new to academia as well as to those seasoned veterans who have paved the way. Marina Cocuzza and Joseph Farrell. Illustrations by Giovanna Nicotra. Luigi Capuana is best known as a theorist of verismo, the Italian version of European realism, which prescribed for the writer the dispassionate and objective representation of reality, however squalid.

So those readers who are unfamiliar with the many interests of Capuana, ranging from photography and etching to folklore, poetry, theater and journalism, will be surprised to discover that not only did he produce a substantial amount of fairy tales, but that he engaged in the genre time and again, from to , the year of his death.

This last collection includes one-act plays. Cocuzza and Farrell speculate that Capuana may have been directed towards the world of pure fantasy by his growing disenchantment with positivistic ideas and with scientific and mechanical progress. Children and adults alike will be delighted with the fables, while savvy readers will recognize the subtle satire of the new state that underlies some of the later tales.

Cocuzza and Farrell offer a penetrating analysis of the collected fairy tales, populated by kings, queens, princes, princesses, magicians and dragons, but also by desperately poor common folk — all endowed with recognizable human traits and instincts. Capuana never distanced himself too much from stark reality. The University of Toronto Press, The conventional view, advanced with erudition and authority by such writers as Richard Andrews and Tim Fitzpatrick, who are generously quoted here, is that the scenarios are of their essence a series of notes to actors, setting out situations or outline plots which allow performers to demonstrate their histrionic abilities and inventiveness by employing improvisational techniques.

There is a more general question in Italian theatre history concerning not just scripts themselves but relations between the actor and the author. The actor ruled at this time, but there is no discussion of individual actors or companies. There being no dispute that actors played stock parts indicated in the main by masks, the issue of creativity is then transferred to the level of individual characterisation in the scenarios. The author believes that they contain adequate individual motivations and skilfully crafted plots, meaning that the scope for different approaches in successive productions is reduced.

Crohn Schmitt is convinced that appreciation and production today require not merely knowledge of the stagecraft in the period when commedia flourished, but of cultural beliefs, social conventions, attitudes of mind and habits of life. This she aims to provide. The first part of the book is dedicated to reconstructing the culture of post-Renaissance Italy, examining the power relations inside families and between the sexes, discussing the habits of indoor and outdoor life, analysing the class structure and the consequent freedoms afforded to the hegemonic and to the subaltern class, the mores relating to marriage and dowries and the ethics of the age.

For her reconstruction, she relies largely on secondary sources and shows familiarity only with those contemporary treatises available in English. This leads to an undue reliance on certain better known works, such as those of Alberti and Castiglione, and an unexamined assumption that these works can be taken as representative. Further, it causes her to make general statements which should be questioned even if the name of a modern scholar can be attached to it. There is a tendency, no stronger in Crohn Schmitt than in others, to approach the past as though it were too foreign a country, and that the way of life was extraordinarily different.

In any case, Scala was no social historian, and a greater attention could have been paid not just to contemporary culture but to the conventions of theatre in his time, or perhaps of all time. Comedy overturns standards while sexual mis conduct always makes nonsense of moral tenets and provides prompts for laughter. Crohn Schmitt creates unnecessary problems for herself when confronted with servants who do not behave with due subservience, but that had been the case since Plautus. The author is puzzled by the prevalence of women dressing as men in the comedies, and wonders if this reflects practise at the time.

Renaissance writings and debates on love leave her perplexed It is hard to know exactly what a literal translation is, in any context. The author is keen to play down, perhaps unduly so, the practise of improvisation. She stresses that performers had committed to memory set speeches and dialogues, and proposes some such speeches from authors of the time that the characters might have spoken in scenes which are only sketched.

It is in this part of the book that Crohn Schmitt makes a genuine effort to make what I take to be her central case — that the scenarios should be more highly valued as plays in the now accepted sense of the word. Alessandro Manzoni nei paesi Anglosassoni. Secondo molti critici la limitata diffusione di tali opere fu dovuta alle mediocri traduzioni e al forte messaggio cattolico espresso negli scritti di Manzoni.

Nella prima parte, la distribuzione del materiale segue un ordine cronologico e un ordine tematico. La prima traduzione in inglese dei promessi sposi fu nel ad opera di Charles Swan il quale ammise di avere omesso molte parti storiche Nel seguirono ben tre traduzioni e poi altre due nel e nel Crosta inserisce molti dettagli sulle traduzioni e fornisce date precise sulle ristampe per dimostrare il vivo interesse che cresceva per il romanzo del Manzoni nei paesi anglosassoni Nelle pagine successive del libro, Crosta richiama tutte quelle dichiarazioni di scrittori e intellettuali inglesi che avevano scritto a favore delle opere manzoniane, come Mary Shelley , e di quelli che si erano ispirati a queste opere nello scrivere le loro.

Spunti manzoniani sono rintracciabili nei romanzi dello scrittore romantico Bulwer Lytton e degli scrittori vittoriani George Eliot 20 , Elizabeth Gaskell e William Gilbert I penultimi capitoli della prima parte del libro sono dedicati al movimento di Oxford tra i cui rappresentanti Newman e Yonge si dimostrarono dei grandi ammiratori del Manzoni. Il penultimo capitolo include il significato dei Promessi sposi come lettura dei personaggi nelle narrazioni di Donald Mitchell e di Catharine Sedgwick On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture, Princeton: Princeton University Press, , p. Nella maggior parte dei casi non si riesce a scorgere nessuna differenza iconografica tra cortigiane, nobildonne e addirittura novelle spose, come nel caso di Giacomo Franco 63, fig.

Vestiti lussuosi, gioielli e seni in vista sono caratteristiche sia degli abiti delle nobildonne veneziane sia delle cortigiane. In base ai dipinti e alle illustrazioni pervenutici, le nobildonne veneziane e le cortigiane sembrano partecipare insieme, nonostante gli emendamenti restrittivi, a balli, feste e riunioni nei salotti del XVI e del XVII secolo, scene spesso trasfigurate attraverso le diciture in rubrica, come nel caso di una scena di ridotto dipinta da Flipart 80, fig.

Cambridge University Press, From the perspective of Galileo Galilei , however, philosophy is written in a grand book that stands continuously open to our gaze, a mathematical masterpiece that cannot always be read in the poetical way described by Piccolomini. For Galileo, poetry may be an ambiguous tool, and philosophy must be expressed in mathematical terms so as to avoid uncertain and equivocal interpretations: Galileo made his argument by becoming a completely new kind of philosopher and — as Piccolomini would remark — by also using, at the same time, the right amount of rhetorical sugar to help his academic and ecclesiastical opponents take his bitter medicine.

Most of the issues addressed by the author open up a variety of aspects of Italian intellectual history and will require a background in Italian epic poetry and natural philosophy in order to be fully comprehended and squarely situated within their proper realms.

For this reason, this text is less suited for a general audience but presents a valuable resource for graduate classes and seminars. La lingua di Galileo. Firenze, Accademia della Crusca, 13 dicembre A cura di Elisabetta Benucci e Raffaella Setti. Si considera dunque la scelta del volgare e della creazione di una nuova lingua per una nuova scienza. Italian Bookshelf stabilisce in qualche modo un nesso tra gli otto interventi e vuole entrare nei particolari di quella polemica tutta galileiana delle parole e delle cose e di come tali parole possano catturare o adeguarsi alle cose.

Si parla spesso di chiarezza e di precisione nella lingua di Galileo. Concludo con un esempio tratto dal saggio di Raffaella Setti, in cui si esamina un brano di Galileo dove, descrivendo la luna, si nota che dalla prima alla seconda stesura lo scienziato introduce una precisazione: The Poetry of Giovanni Meli. Giovanni Meli is generally recognized as the greatest poet of the Sicilian language.

His copious poetic output defies classification as it is situated between the movement of Arcadia and the nascent Romanticism. Writers in the local vernaculars are at a disadvantage, since their work is accessible only to a limited readership, so translations are of key importance for making their work accessible to a vaster audience. Italian Bookshelf a painter of idyllic and bucolic scenes, but of an empiricist with idealistic tendencies, a physician-poet steeped in science and philosophy and aware of social injustice, who was also endowed with an extraordinary sensitivity to the beauty of nature.

Next are selections from La buccolica Bucolic Poetry , inspired by Theocritus and comprising sonnets and idylls descriptive of the four seasons, celebrating nature and inviting to love, yet suffused with a sense of skepticism that foreshadows Leopardi. The anthology includes eighty-nine Favuli morali Moral Fables , in which Meli pursues a genre that had gained great popularity and critical esteem. In these works Meli shows his admiration for the animal world that lives according to its natural instincts without gratuitously harming others, while contrasting it with the predatory human species that deceives and kills through reason.

He captures every shade and nuance of the original in simple, direct and modern English verse, even preserving — wherever possible — the cadence and rhyme-scheme of the original. Dimmi, dimmi, apuzza nica: Trema ancora, ancora luci And along the field the dew la ruggiada ntra li prati: Li ciuriddi durmigghiusi Pretty flowers, sleepy-eyed, ntra li virdi soi buttuni and still snug and tightly closed stannu ancora stritti e chiusi in their verdant buds abiding, cu li testi a pinnuluni.

Italian Bookshelf Cipolla is universally recognized as a Meli authority. Dopo una breve ma chiara Introduzione, si legge una essenziale Nota al testo nella quale il curatore descrive le fonti, cui segue un denso saggio sui I testi e la loro storia. Dopo queste porzioni introduttive, si legge il testo dei due poemetti e in appendice la riproduzione del ms.

Il testo critico migliora in alcuni punti la lezione rispetto a quello approntato da Isella, sanando alcune sviste del precedente critico. Si segnala il commento a cura di S. Il risultato di queste ricerche non permette al critico di sciogliere definitivamente i dubbi e Biancardi decide prudenzialmente di pubblicare in appendice la trascrizione del frammento unitamente alla digitalizzazione del manoscritto. Scritti polemici a cura e con introduzione di Silvia Morgana e Paolo Bartesaghi fino ai tre volumi apparsi nel Chiudono il volume una serie di indici: Nella descrizione degli stampati si notano alcune imprecisioni: Italian Bookshelf una nuova edizione critica.

In alcuni casi sfuggono i criteri impiegati: Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy: From Sprezzatura to Satire. The author of this book, Professor Eugenia Paulicelli, is the foremost cultural studies specialist on Italian fashion in the US. Paulicelli has published extensively on this topic, focusing on an impressive diversity of historical periods, including the Middle Ages, the Fascist ventennio, and contemporary times.

She is currently working on a study of fashion in postwar Italy. As the title makes clear, her latest volume under review here looks at clothing and fashion during the early modern period in Italy: The book is divided in three parts, each of which consists of two chapters that are in turn broken down into multiple subsections. Emphasis is placed on defining an Italian identity through clothes, within a moral geography centered on Europe. Hair, Wigs and Other Vices. Her Paternal Tyranny describes hair as a contested signifier of gender: The sixth and final chapter, with which the book ends rather abruptly: Italian Bookshelf about the power of fashion in shaping culture, and the anxiety provoked precisely by an awareness of this power.

Fashion is seductive because it allows for multiple identities and selves, and for this very reason moralists have condemned it for centuries, as can be seen in the literary narratives examined in this volume. This well-researched and well-organized book is bound to appeal to a variety of readers: My only criticism concerns not the content of the study, but the level of copyediting done by Ashgate Press. The book, in my view, ought to have been edited for readability and idiomatic English, whereas it currently reads, in places, as an all-too-literal translation from the Italian, with awkward and unclear passages that impede a smooth reading.

Dal punto di vista teorico, prendere in considerazione i fallimenti delle tragedie di Foscolo significa analizzare i suoi scritti di critica letteraria, contemporanei o posteriori alle sue opere teatrali, da una nuova prospettiva. Dopo la sezione introduttiva, in cui Walsh delinea il piano della sua opera, troviamo, nel primo capitolo, un compendio della situazione del teatro tragico italiano nel diciottesimo secolo.

Nel terzo capitolo, la studiosa analizza dettagliatamente le vicende legate alla composizione e alla rappresentazione della seconda tragedia foscoliana, Ajace. Il quinto capitolo si focalizza sulle riflessioni finali di Foscolo in materia di genere tragico e sul contributo che egli dette, attraverso i suoi scritti, al dibattito fra classicisti e romantici. Italian Bookshelf vicende personali, permette a Walsh di analizzare a fondo il Foscolo tragico: This monumental volume of pages, published in occasion of the homonymous exhibition held between Venice and Pavia at the beginning of , is the product of a scholarly effort of extensive proportions.

The biographies of all artists protagonists of the exhibition are also part of the volume. The third section includes four short essays on specific case studies relative to the exhibition, whereas the following chapter displays most of the prints of the exhibited works of art and a series of swift biographies of the artists prominent in the exhibit. Valmore, , its third part contains four interesting essays relative to the exhibition itself. Leonardo Clerici introduces us to the Sarenco Collection with a dense, playful, and poetic associative text, and Allegrini reconstructs the history of the poetic ceramics first conceived by Sarenco and executed by ceramist Michelangelo Marchi.

In conclusion, Visual Poetry, in spite of having as main referent the wider public, is an editorial project that constitutes a useful point of reference for scholars working in that area of study. Italian Bookshelf of the mutual influences that occurred between Italian and international authors are left less explored I am referring especially to the German, Swiss, and Latin American contributions.

However, the high quality reproduction of art works that characterizes SKIRA editions and the wide array of authors here included make the volume one of the most complete and useful publications to date on this form of artistic expression. Delfino, Columbia University Pierpaolo Antonello.

La foto in copertina di un Pasolini pensieroso che guarda dritto verso la telecamera seduto di spalle verso una biblioteca piena di libri, potrebbe fungere da simbolo: Fascist Italy and the Middle East, In a compelling introduction, Arielli describes how assessments of the Fascist policy remain divided.

However, for British and North American historians e. Seeking to mediate between these two schools of thought, Arielli approaches the topic by considering domestic and economic forces, in addition to European foreign policy and expansionistic claims. The remainder of the introduction describes the organization of the volume in six separate sections and concludes with an important observation about the methodological difficulties that studies of this sort pose since the Arab perception of the Fascist policy remains somewhat difficult to assess.

Arielli discusses how the regime, in its effort to find support for its claims on Ethiopia, launched a propaganda campaign that presented the Abyssinians as enemies of Egypt and Islam. Headed by Ugo Dadone, this agency disseminated all sorts of pro-Italian material in French and Arabic. In Egypt the campaign in Abyssinia was vigorously opposed and the only support that it received came from the Italian communities residing in Alexandria, Cairo, Port Said, and Suez. Jewish opinion in Palestine, including that of Zionists, also remained unfavorable towards Italy. Arielli examines, once again, the central role played by Ciano in consolidating and presenting the Fascist Middle Eastern policy at home and abroad.

Efforts abroad included the building of mosques and schools in Ethiopia; the granting of religious freedom to all followers of Islam; and the allocation of money to assist Muslim subjects who were traveling to Mecca and Medina for the yearly Haj. The apex of these propagandist efforts took place in Tripoli in mid-March The unrest was seen by Fascist Italy as the chance to consolidate its anti-British policies and so the decision was made to supply military assistance to the Palestinians.

Italian Bookshelf the Italian support of the Palestinians, explaining that they ranged from the moderately appreciative to the skeptical. In this chapter, Arielli provides a concise but very illuminating overview of Fascist racial legislation at home and in the colonies. He points out that, despite the racial laws, Balbo was very careful to project an image of respect and tolerance among Libyan subjects so as to avoid unrest and revolt.

Nevertheless, the aggressive imperialism and mounting racism of the Fascist regime were not lost onthe people of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and Syria who openly ridiculed the notions of Italians as protectors of Islam. Yet, by the late s, it had become clear, both at home and abroad, that Italy lacked the military and financial power to widen its territories. A fascinating, lucidly written and well-argued book, this is a must read for all those interested in 20th-century Italian cultural history.

Watching the Moon and Other Plays. Veteran translator Patricia Gaborik has given the English reader a fascinating glimpse into the theatrical currents of the ventennio with her finely crafted and arresting versions of three plays by Massimo Bontempelli Bontempelli, one of a legion of intellectuals whose zeal for fascism earned him a date with opprobrium and ultimately exclusion following the war, is a writer whose works seem to encapsulate neatly the swirling trends of Italian art from the s to the s. There is also a valuable analysis of the mutual influence between Bontempelli and Pirandello.

In Stormcloud, a supernatural weather system descends on an unsuspecting village and visits death upon its children and also on Regina, a girl caught between adolescence and womanhood. Regina returns to life midway through the play, paying visits to her two astonished suitors.

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Cinderella is a modern take on the old story, in which a plucky Cinderella charms the prince but ends up running off with a viola player the play was originally conceived as a musical for the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. While the plays vary greatly in style and tone, the reader is left to make fascinating connections as a result of several significant consistencies. The plays are rife with Christological and mythological references the aforementioned viola player in Cinderella is called Icarus. Ann Matter examines the controversial history of transmission of the under-studied Psalmi penitentiales, an Augustinian dialogue that mirrors the Secretum through simultaneous concern for love and penitence.

Stefano Cracolici reveals how the relentless revision of the Invective ad medicum dehistoricized the specific occasion of its composition to become a functional and rational literary genre, rather than a formal example of classical invective. Lynn Lara Westwater reconstructs the more contemporary, but no less public, self-fashioned image of the poet in the Lettere disperse — letters excluded from the Familiares and Seniles, which maintain their historicity, offering a different side of the Petrarch who endlessly revised and reordered letters destined for posterity.

Nevertheless, this volume is a critical tour de force previously unseen in Petrarch studies, whose essays and extensive bibliography are indispensable to Medieval and Renaissance scholars in all fields. By the same token, the research presented on Italian and Spanish primary texts is nicely balanced. The collection is rich as well in its engagement with a variety of generic forms: Performativity was paramount, at the same time, as a means to showcase ideas and ideals of manhood. Malleable and slippery as a concept in practice and in theory, masculinity was created and negotiated on and off the written page, never losing its indisputable bond to social structures that bestowed or withheld power from its male subjects.

This is what the majority of the essays in the volume lead us to understand. This idea resonated with theatrical practice wherein female performers were preferred to males in drag, a custom enforced by legislative measures. Moving outside the domain of the superbly popular conduct manual, we come to the equally influential genres of epic and chivalric romance. The Poetics of Masculinity invites our own creative integration of this fascinating tool of gendered analysis toward an ever more nuanced understanding of the early modern world. Luigi Pulci e la Chimera. Ad ogni modo, il libro dello studioso della Fordham University di pregi ne ha anche altri, oltre quello della chiarezza.

La focalizzazione di Luigi Pulci e la Chimera si gioca su due aspetti, corrispondenti a due sezioni del volume: Incrociando notizie biografiche e letterarie, lo studioso ci consegna una ricostruzione degli accadimenti molto ridimensionata, rispetto alla vulgata di un dissidio insanabile con il signore di Firenze coniugato al funesto contrasto con il filosofo e il prete di corte e concorda dunque con Decaria per quanto riguarda la portata dello scontro di Pulci con gli ultimi due. Essays in Honour of Paul F. Konrad Eisenbichler and Nicholas Terpstra.

Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies Publications, Una docenza fertile, caratterizzata da un singolare approccio dialettico ed interdisciplinare del metodo inquisitivo, in cui storia, sociologia, cultura, antropologia, religione, filosofia convergono e si compongono ordinatamente in un singolare specillum investigativo.

Dopo la suggestiva rievocazione autobiografica di Nicholas Terpstra Roads to the Renaissance: Two Jesuit Humanists at Naples Michele a Firenze, venne inaugurata nel The Politics of Comforting the Condemned , analizza il fenomeno della diffusione delle conforterie bolognesi.

Mantenuta la divisione simmetrica dei tre saggi, la sezione mira ad analizzare la natura dei meccanismi di controllo attuati attraverso 1 la testimonianza dei tribunali vescovili o fori ecclesiastici E. Enlightened Statesman or Miracle Worker? Paul Grendler at the University of Toronto, il suo centro gravitazionale. Grendler e i suoi anni canadesi. The essay by W. Rossiter especially considers the translating and interpretative strategies adopted by Chaucer trying to adapt some of the Latin and Vulgar writings by Petrarch into his own language.

Consequently, it appears that the revered Italian poet is mostly responsible for pointing out the two terms of paraphrase and metaphrase as the two most important theoretical terms of the question. Seemingly as a matter of priority, the author excludes any possibility of an encounter between the two poets The meticulous examination of the linguistic and formal alterations undergone by Petrarchan sonnet in the Chaucerian translation permits Rossiter to promulgate a tripartite conclusion regarding the overwhelming poetic role of Chaucer in England.

First, his primacy in spreading the knowledge and love for Petrarch throughout the country, as well as the foundation of the English sonnet; secondarily, his implicit exertion of the connection between Petrarch and Boccaccio based upon their common stilnovistic inheritance; finally, the extent of themes to which a Petrarchan sonnet can ascribe. For this reason, the plurality of interpretations to which it eventually invites the reader, the author eschews the medieval danger of closing up the hermeneutic richness of the text on a univocal moral conclusion The undoubtedly successful result of exhaustive and thorough research about one of the most relevant early modern authors, the text is in fact also a deep and important reconsideration about some of the literary strategies which modernity has inherited from the past.

La donna nel Rinascimento meridionale. Atti del convegno internazionale Roma novembre Fabrizio Serra Editore, Trentuno relatori, italiani e stranieri, servendosi della varia tipologia di fonti archivistiche e degli studi che recentemente hanno arricchito la bibliografia, con determinazione e acribia, hanno delineato la condizione sociale della donna nel Rinascimento meridionale.

Dante e lo stesso Petrarca le associavano uno dei sette peccati capitali, la lussuria. Ecco il silenzio della donna nelle pagine oscene del Novellino di Tommaso Guardati, detto Masuccio Salernitano. Il breve trattato del cardinale Pompeo Colonna, Apologia mulierum, testimonia la presenza a Napoli di donne che promuovevano concrete iniziative assistenziali e ponevano il monastero al centro di incontri e salotti letterari.

Il Canzoniere di Petrarca tra codicologia ed ecdotica. Previous editions — from the Aldine edition to the Canzoniere of Gianfranco Contini, first published in and often accorded the status of a critical edition, to the facsimile edition of the manuscript Vaticano Latino published under the direction of Gino Belloni, Furio Brugnolo, H.

Wayne Storey and Stefano Zamponi — are all rejected as inadequate by Savoca. Like every editor, however, Savoca makes decisions that are not defensible on the basis of the manuscript, and in any case, as Savoca points out, Vat. In the 18 th and 19th centuries scholars did not even recognize Vat. Savoca is the first editor to return to the Vat. Commas function both rhythmically and semantically, and sometimes signify a brief pause to negotiate tension between rhythm and significance; they isolate or coordinate elements within and between clauses.

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Savoca argues that the subtlety with which the poet used the pause guarantees the musicality of the Canzoniere and the accretion of meaning. This is the principal innovation of the edition. In compensation, the musicality of each work is enhanced, as is the fluidity of the entire Canzoniere as the reader passes from one composition to the next. The first line is punctuated with a colon, which charges the remainder of the sonnet, an accumulation of hyperbole praising the singularity of the beloved, to serve as a proof for the sweeping initial pronouncement.

The thirteenth line again ends with a colon, and the sonnet concludes with a first person description of the poet as a man bewitched by the qualities of this woman: Unlike Contini, but in keeping with Vat. According to Savoca, the comma in line three invites the reader to reflect on the happy contrast between the blond youth and the white head of maturity, and to mediate and harmonize the sound and sense.

Removing the comma in line ten means losing a stylistic trait absolutely specific to Petrarch, that is, the use of the comma before the conjunction e, et. La breccia di Porta Pia. This was an event in which De Amicis himself had participated as a young army officer and military journalist. These accounts are truly passionate, but still embellished, in order to imprint Rome in the hearts of the Italian people, as future capital of the still incomplete kingdom of Italy. His memories, however, are more pamphlets than detailed reports.

Real events and fictional invention are commixed, and his stories become tools to build memories, rather than to preserve them. His stories are presented in a delectable way to involve people in the national effort to unify Italy. De Amicis distinguishes people in three groups However, general enthusiasm among population for the new fate of Rome is the goal to reach, rather than the genuine representation of an already given fact: Ci fu entusiasmo davvero?

Thus, as ideological as he would appear, he wants to sell enthusiasm, because it is more moving than rigorous thinking. On the one hand, De Amicis reassures his reader that the unification process is not determined to suppress the Catholic Church. De Amicis reassures the woman: More than on papal Rome, the new Italian capital will have to be modeled on the classical one. Rather than Catholic churches and altars built by popes to redefine the symbolic value of public spaces, the open-air monuments of Ancient Rome should inspire politicians and common people to shape the new secular Italian capital city.

However, the Italian national army, as opposed to the papal one, is presented as the embodiment of a national unity that, while preserving the variety of idioms and characters, is able to move with one heart and mind: Similarly, there is no reference to Roman Jews still obliged to live in the Ghetto, although most of them interpreted the breach of Porta Pia as a messianic event. U of Nebraska P, This is how Mantegazza imagined life to be in the year The Isle of Experiments comprises other little states, such as Poligama where men have many wives , Polyandra where women have many husbands , Cenobia where men live in ascetism , Monachia where nuns are devoted to the cult of Sappho and, finally, Peruvia where life is modeled on the ancient socialist regime of the Incan Empire.

A Dream is a book that bespeaks more of its own era than of the future it purports to unveil. Utopia, and Antonio Ghislanzoni Abrakadabra. A Dream constitutes an important addition to the relatively small number of nineteenth-century Italian novels available in English and is an invaluable text to add to any class, whether within a comparative context or not, teaching nineteenth-century Italian literature. La parola scritta e pronunciata. Nuovi saggi sulla narrativa di Vincenzo Consolo.

San Cesario di Lecce: I vari contributi, disposti cronologicamente a seconda del testo di cui si occupano, sono chiusi da un saggio dello stesso Consolo che, per la sua pregnanza di significati ed allusioni ne arricchisce il volume. Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture. Nella seconda sezione, gli interventi si concentrano sul rapporto tra alcuni modelli teorici o aspetti concettuali e il pensiero postmoderno.

Alessia Ronchetti, invece, analizza il postmodernismo alla luce della scuola italiana della differenza sessuale, basando le proprie riflessioni sui lavori di Luisa Muraro e Adriana Cavarero. Il volume, attraverso i suoi quattordici interventi, affronta in maniera molto seria una questione fondamentale di tutta la letteratura e del postmoderno in particolare: Domande di comprensione e suggerimenti per la discussione in classe seguono ogni sezione di testo.

Gli studenti possono anche consultare due appendici, che offrono una selezione di saggi, racconti e testimonianze, a illustrazione delle problematiche precedentemente toccate. Anche in questi capitoli, Bartalesi-Graf integra la propria sintesi storico-sociale con testimonianze documentarie, tra le quali interviste da lei condotte in Basilicata nel A Levi e alla sua opera sono dedicati i tre capitoli centrali.

Laddove opportuno, le schede contengono indicazioni per considerazioni inter-testuali rispetto al Cristo oppure ad altri quadri. Il capitolo si chiude con due sezioni dedicate ad argomenti di ricerca e discussione, e con una breve ma completa bibliografia e lista di siti internet dove trovare riproduzioni dei dipinti di Levi. Il capitolo si sofferma soprattutto sul confronto tra il testo e il film, approfondendone poi alcune tematiche comuni.

I testi nelle appendici, inoltre, permettono di ascoltare, oltre a quella di Levi, altre voci dal sud. Italian Travel Writing Between the Wars. Remapping Cultural History 7. While connected by these concerns, each chapter in Journeys through Fascism is nonetheless fairly autonomous, not simply with regard to the geographical region under consideration, but also in terms of the kind of writer examined and, to some extent, the critical approach adopted.

Wisely, Burdett restricts the scope of his study in a number of ways: Geographical displacement is often accompanied by a sense of temporal displacement. Moreover, as Burdett suggests, Journeys through Fascism may well provide stimulus for future research in a number of disciplines: This important work certainly points toward other complimentary areas of research, including the broader phenomenon of domestic and foreign tourism among the general public already examined by Richard Bosworth. Italian Comics of the s and s. UP of Mississippi, The number of rigorous, book-length studies devoted to the critical evaluation of comics can scarcely fill one shelf in an average-sized bookcase.

Although the study of comics is beginning to gain the status that the study of cinema attained on university campuses in the s, the volume of scholarship is playing catch- up. Italian Comics of the s and s represents the still rare effort that focuses on a relatively narrow part of national, aesthetic, and cultural comics history, and for that reason alone is a welcome addition to the field.

In his first section, Castaldi discusses the post-war Italian comics that tended to feature adventure stories, or riffs on American genres such as the western, that were produced primarily with a younger audience in mind. As Castaldi notes, the artistic quality of these comics varied widely.

The magazine also routinely carried American strips, such as Peanuts, along with the left-leaning strips Pogo and Doonesbury. He points to the introduction of the independently published Cannibale in the spring of as the beginning of new adult comics. Additionally, the comic addressed contemporary issues often as they were happening that few publications and certainly no other comics were featuring, including drug addiction and homosexuality.

The most popular of all adult comics, Il male, began in February The comic which carried Cannibale as a supplement until it stopped publishing was overwhelmingly satirical in tone, adhering to no strict political line other than to attack any dominant value or convention of the era. Il male reached the peak of its popularity during the Moro kidnapping. Cannibale, which ceased publishing after nine issues, resurfaced in late as the less political Frigidaire.

It found an audience in a generation tired of the political slant of the previous decade by embracing characteristics of the Italian high-post-modernist phase in the s. This dilemma makes the third section, in which Castaldi provides thorough evaluations of key artists and writers, all the more essential. I found myself on Amazon, searching in vain for the work of Pazienza, Tamburini, the Valvoline Group, and others mentioned by Castaldi, and had no luck with the exception of the occasional used copy, usually in Italian. Hopefully, Drawn and Dangerous will inspire a new and heightened interest in these artists, leading to greater awareness and availability of their works in the U.

Viaggio nella narrativa sperimentale italiana del XX secolo. Ma Scrivere contro si segnala soprattutto per la coerenza del metodo. Decisamente un ottimo lavoro questo di Paolo Cherchi e Cosetta Seno Reed che proprio nel carattere divulgativo del progetto ha il suo maggior pregio. Anzi proprio la grande fortuna della gastronomia, secondo quanto ricostruiscono Paolo Cherchi e Cosetta Seno Reed, sembra ricucire quella cesura originaria di due formati, di due culture, di due Italie divise.

I vocaboli sono divisi per campi semantici di appartenenza abbigliamento, alcolici, architettura, ecc. Sono fornite anche informazioni sulla specie grammaticale e notizie sulla storia dei termini e sulle eventuali mediazioni o interferenze con altre lingue. Quali previsioni si possono fare? Quali saranno i prossimi italianismi che entreranno ad ogni diritto nel vocabolario inglese per rimanervi? Se lo chiedono i due autori del volume e non hanno dubbi: Due to these circumstances, the notion of italicity must be expanded beyond the borders of the Italian peninsula to include a transnational network of people who are connected with or interested in Italian culture.

Italian Bookshelf According to the author, the catalyst of this movement was the increased possibility of communicating and traveling at a low cost. The benefit of this new and more inclusive definition of citizenship is that it will allow Italy to claim a more significant role in the international arena and to incorporate into Italian culture the richness of a transnational network of experiences. Notwithstanding the interesting premises offered by Bassetti, however, a question remains unanswered: Does this category include everyone who has ever been interested in Italian culture?

Or does membership demand some type of accompanying action? It should be noted, however, that despite numerous examples throughout the text, a solid definition of the new Italic is absent. Interestingly enough, an Italic shares a passion for Italian culture, as does the readership of the magazine in which these articles first appeared.

Despite the necessity of acknowledging the growing importance of Italophiles outside the borders and the increasing interest in Italy culture outside the peninsula, the theorization of this network lacks a real rigor, and thus the category becomes much too broad: If an Italic is simply someone with a strong interest in Italian culture, can we include people who strive to migrate to Italy?

If so, how should those Italics be included? Their inclusion within or exclusion from the paradigm expands the basis for debate, and would have enriched this work significantly. Italic Lessons, when read together with Italici, represents a stimulating introduction to the study of the concept of citizenship in Italy.

With the approach of the year-anniversary of Italian Unification, the number of publications regarding this topic has vastly increased. To orient oneself in relation to this vast literary corpus, the two texts constitute a conversational introduction that covers a vast range of contemporary issues in a captivating style. The publishing house itself was founded in as a non-profit publisher of the semi-annual magazine Voices in Italian Americana, dedicated to Italian American Literature and cultures, as well as the periodical Italiana, devoted to Italian language writing in the United States.

The Crossings series was established in to promote works just like this volume by Leonilde Frieri Ruberto. Italian Bookshelf Leonilde Frieri was born in in the small town of Cairano in the Avellino province of Campania. Having completed the fourth grade, she eventually followed her husband to America with her four children in These memoirs were recorded at the prompting of one of her daughters following the Irpinia earthquake that destroyed more than half of her village.

Ruberto, is the principal translator of this memoir, although several family members contributed along the way as well. Also, Ilaria Serra, an assistant professor at Florida Atlantic University, wrote the introduction to this work. The preface, composed by Ruberto, explains that Frieri wrote eighty pages over two weeks in while her husband was visiting Cairano and she stayed with her daughters on Long Island. Written in cursive and in a mix of standard Italian, the Cairanese dialect, and a smattering of English, Ruberto translated these pages between and The introduction by Ilaria Serra provides information on several aspects that are particular to this type of work.

First of all she provides some background on the rarity of immigrant biographies, particularly those written by women. Furthermore, she highlights that 14 of the 19 different dates used to situate the events historically are related directly to family events while only 5 are world historical events such as wars.

The text, indeed, does flow like a river. In the 46 pages of prose, there are only 44 sentences and most of those hold no grammatical correctness. In the Italian, which occupies the second half of the book, the reader notices that there are major stylistic and grammatical inconsistencies. For example, there is no standard capitalization of words, many spelling errors since most words are spelled phonetically, no accents, a lack of agreement and a distinct lack of appropriate punctuation.

In the English translation, Laura Ruberto was faithful to the original composition only altering spelling and grammatical correctness to allow the sentences to make sense to the reader. Another particularly interesting element is the emotional detachment that permeates much of the text. The author seems to have very little emotional investment in so many of the events in her life. The majority of this memoir is focused on the daily activities and goings-on of a small rural Italian village. The only elements about which the reader will note any particular emotional reaction pertain to the family, to which Frieri is fiercely dedicated.

Of her life in America, she explains that she did everything a good wife should: It seems that that sadness also defined America for the author since America never held any of the beauty or happiness or familial tradition that Italy held for her.

It is written as if a grandchild suddenly turned to her and asked if she too played this game as a child and the response was recorded on paper. Part of the brilliance of this work is the lack of planning, a lack of attention to what to include and what to omit, and a lack of attention to chronological accuracy. This is an authentic account of life after Italy. Laura Ruberto has produced an incredibly faithful translation of the original text, while Ilaria Serra has created an introduction that provides the necessary background information for a reader to appreciate the nuance not only in the story but in the relationship of this memoir to this particularly genre of literature.

Performing the Life of Black Migrants to Italy. In the preface to his work, Furno provides a broad discussion on how categories of identity, race, migration, and especially intra-ethnic relations shape the work of the Albe performers. Furno also devotes a few paragraphs to making a case for the importance of the work of the Albe. In other words, the stage-work of the company offers migrants the possibility for cultural agency and self-affirmation, empowering them to voice their presence and rights in the destination culture. Furno argues that whereas up to the Renaissance, Catholicism was generally accepting of black Africans as human beings capable of participating in the grace of God through the evangelical project, during the late Renaissance race became part of a utilitarian policy that legitimated world colonization while justifying racial subjugation.

For Furno, this missed opportunity is reflected in the generalized perception towards blackness of contemporary Italian media. By featuring the black actor Awa Niang in the role of Arlecchino, I ventidue infortuni short-circuits racial boundaries and questions easy constructions of blackness versus whiteness but also of dominating and dominated, central and peripheral, mainstream and marginal. The multiple concerns of this play indicate how in Ruh the connections between Africa and Romagna were still at an embryonic stage.

The remainder of the chapter discusses the work of the first Senegalese actors who collaborated with the Albe. The reader learns that they were street vendors who eventually left the company to go back to more profitable work. According to Furno, this episode was a watershed in the public perception of migration inasmuch as Italian culture was forced to acknowledge the reality of migrants and embark on a political debate about racism in Italy and the inhuman living conditions of many immigrants.

Despite the significance of nationally televised broadcasts such as Nonsolonero, Un mondo a colori, Shukran, and the two columns from La Repubblica, Metropolis and Gli altri noi, mainstream media continue to present migration as a temporary state of emergency rather than a reality that demands a reassessment of the Italian juridical system. Furno also dwells at length on the erosion of a social welfare system that widens the gap between the wealthy and the poor. The multiple sites of the performances and the dispersed models of social engagement and solidarity that the play creates in the mind of the spectators are interpreted by Furno as the only strategies to resist a power that, in an era of globalization, has become dislocated and de-territorialized.

Dalle avventure ai miracoli. Massimo Bontempelli fra narrativa e metanarrativa. Fifty years after his death, Massimo Bontempelli remains a somewhat under- recognized figure in the landscape of Italian modernism. While there are several studies that offer a panoramic view of his life and literary production, much still remains to be done when it comes to the investigation of individual works.

As she rightly argues, the prose works of this period are characterized by the proliferation of self-referential and meta-narrative devices — something that has been noted in passing by several critics but never seriously analyzed in detail. The book is divided into six chapters, preceded by a short theoretical introduction on the notion of meta-narrative.

In the remaining five chapters, one or more meta-narrative devices or strategies are discussed in relation to a specific work. Indeed, Giordano is at her best when, as here, she engages in the close reading of individual texts. Less convincing, on the contrary, is her use of theoretical material. The subject of chapter four is the novella La scacchiera davanti allo specchio Writing, like the ludic activity of children, involves the construction of a fictional world that interprets and re-invents reality in a creative and playful way.

By identifying in Eva ultima some typical anti-realist motifs of this second kind of magic realism — the carnival spirit, the enchanted journey, primitivism etc. Dalle avventure ai miracoli is not without problems. In places, it reads a bit too much like the doctoral thesis from which it seems to be derived, especially in its over-reliance on secondary sources, profusely quoted at the expense of a more personal elaboration of the material.

Finally, the book would have benefited from a more careful editing, as there are numerous grammatical and lexical infelicities as well formal inconsistencies that suggest a somewhat rushed production it is not clear, for instance, why bibliographical references are sometimes given in an endnote and sometimes included parenthetically directly in the text. On the positive side, this book makes a useful contribution to our understanding of Bontempelli and, more in general, of that middle-brow experimentalism on the border between the transgressive spirit of the avant- garde and the orthodoxy of the realist mainstream that characterizes the s.

In other words, far from being an eccentric writer of sophisticated fables, Bontempelli in fact emerges here as a forerunner of much of post-modern fiction, of which he anticipated a number of central themes and concerns. Image, Eye and Art in Calvino. A questo scopo Martin McLaughlin privilegia Gli amori difficili, raccolta finora fin troppo poco studiata. Margarethe Hagen porta alla ribalta che le Cosmicomiche contengono due racconti che costituiscono una riscrittura del mito di Orfeo da prospettive diametralmente opposte.

Si riposizionano in modo irrevocabile la figura del narratore, quella del lettore, ma anche il testo stesso. La parte successiva, dal titolo Arte,contiene tre capitoli relativi alla pittura. Ne testimonia la scelta delle varie copertine che entrano in una dialettica con il discorso narrativo o altro.

Maria Pia De Paulis-Dalembert. Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, Esso fa seguito a un convegno sulla letteratura poliziesca italiana tenutosi nel alla Sorbona, organizzato dal C. Da questi punti di partenza si sviluppano i saggi che compongono la raccolta. Pie Peter Lang, Le storie di De Cataldo offrono dunque spunti talmente interessanti da far pensare che le ipotesi avanzate nella finzione letteraria possano portare a delle utili conclusioni nella vita reale.

Somigli si sofferma sui gialli storici di Loriano Macchiavelli, sottolineando come essi non redimano gli errori del passato ma anzi li presentino come cause principali dei problemi del presente. La De Paulis si sofferma sul modo in cui Corrado Augias ha rappresentato in Quella mattina di Luglio il bombardamento, avvenuto nel , del quartiere San Lorenzo a Roma. Chirumbolo si esprime invece con toni critici nei confronti di chi, come Giampaolo Pansa, negli ultimi anni ha sottolineato il lato oscuro della lotta partigiana.

Per Alessia Risi il problema di trovare una memoria collettiva presenta aspetti di carattere storico, ma anche sociale e geografico. Per De Boer caricare di nuova suspense un fatto passato ne riapre le interpretazioni, svolgendo dunque un ruolo fondamentale nel modo di relazionarsi con la storia.

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Civitella in Val di Chiana AR: These poets include T. Eliot and Giuseppe Ungaretti, indubitably canonical figures in any discussion regarding text-life relationships. This book establishes a number of fundamental problems involved in defining autobiographical poetry, particularly in the Italian and English traditions.

At the same time, because of its limited space, the volume cannot offer a systematic treatment of the topic, a task that a larger-scale study might aim to undertake. Bulzoni, , is another defining feature of the lyric subject at hand, one to which a broader study on this issue might potentially pay further attention. Divided in two sections, the volume could have developed a greater cohesion in its two parts. The study is clearly a stimulating introduction to the topic, so much so that readers might wish for a more in-depth analysis of the myriad reactions of the contemporary interviewees, whose answers display a range of responses, from the comprehensive and incisive e.

Certain Italian models of the lyric tradition, such as Dante and Petrarch, constitute a consistent point of reference in the interviews in the second section e. Notions of performativity and gender such as in the work of Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero might also have been used to greater effect in the volume, which, because of its brevity, cannot deal in depth with questions of gender, race or sexuality, and the implications of these issues for a poetic mode of self-representation. These theorists, who are mentioned in passing both by Lerro himself in the theoretical introduction, and by a number of the interviewees, are by necessity situated outside the scope of the volume, and yet they might prove interesting critical touchstones for a larger and more exhaustive study.

Given the brevity of the volume, one cannot quibble with the limitations of the final bibliography, or the few entries from unexpected sources, including online encyclopedias and dictionaries. Bulzoni, , and Il testo autobiografico nel Novecento ed. Reimar Klein and Rossana Bonadei, Milano: Guerini e Associati, might have proved stimulating points of reference.

Studies in Italian Americana 2. This anthology is the English translation of the Italian book previously published as Quei bravi ragazzi, Il cinema italoamericano contemporaneo Venezia: Marsilio Editori, , edited by Muscio and Spagnoletti. Its purpose is to study how Italian immigrants and their descendants use film as a means to address issues of identity, and examines the representation of Italian Americans in film, as well as their contributions as directors, screenwriters and actors.

She summarizes the cultural history of the children of the motherland as she reviews the different stages of Italian assimilation in the United States: The first group contributed to the world of entertainment through maintaining traditions common to Italian popular theater. Furthermore, they were granted unrestricted access by immigration officers if they declared themselves musicians and actors.

Muscio reviews the conditions that led to the Southern Italian immigration to North America which had different conditions and consequences for the cohort that immigrated to South America , and the negative stereotypes and myths that emerged and labeled them instinctive, passionate, violent, and with ties to the Mafia. The outbreak of World War II made Italians enemies in their new homeland, and in their self-defense led to the erasure of their cultural heritage. Ecco il silenzio della donna nelle pagine oscene del Novellino di Tommaso Guardati, detto Masuccio Salernitano.

Il breve trattato del cardinale Pompeo Colonna, Apologia mulierum, testimonia la presenza a Napoli di donne che promuovevano concrete iniziative assistenziali e ponevano il monastero al centro di incontri e salotti letterari. Il Canzoniere di Petrarca tra codicologia ed ecdotica. Previous editions — from the Aldine edition to the Canzoniere of Gianfranco Contini, first published in and often accorded the status of a critical edition, to the facsimile edition of the manuscript Vaticano Latino published under the direction of Gino Belloni, Furio Brugnolo, H.

Wayne Storey and Stefano Zamponi — are all rejected as inadequate by Savoca. Like every editor, however, Savoca makes decisions that are not defensible on the basis of the manuscript, and in any case, as Savoca points out, Vat. In the 18 th and 19th centuries scholars did not even recognize Vat. Savoca is the first editor to return to the Vat. Commas function both rhythmically and semantically, and sometimes signify a brief pause to negotiate tension between rhythm and significance; they isolate or coordinate elements within and between clauses.

Savoca argues that the subtlety with which the poet used the pause guarantees the musicality of the Canzoniere and the accretion of meaning. This is the principal innovation of the edition. In compensation, the musicality of each work is enhanced, as is the fluidity of the entire Canzoniere as the reader passes from one composition to the next. The first line is punctuated with a colon, which charges the remainder of the sonnet, an accumulation of hyperbole praising the singularity of the beloved, to serve as a proof for the sweeping initial pronouncement.

The thirteenth line again ends with a colon, and the sonnet concludes with a first person description of the poet as a man bewitched by the qualities of this woman: Unlike Contini, but in keeping with Vat. According to Savoca, the comma in line three invites the reader to reflect on the happy contrast between the blond youth and the white head of maturity, and to mediate and harmonize the sound and sense. Removing the comma in line ten means losing a stylistic trait absolutely specific to Petrarch, that is, the use of the comma before the conjunction e, et.

La breccia di Porta Pia. This was an event in which De Amicis himself had participated as a young army officer and military journalist. These accounts are truly passionate, but still embellished, in order to imprint Rome in the hearts of the Italian people, as future capital of the still incomplete kingdom of Italy. His memories, however, are more pamphlets than detailed reports. Real events and fictional invention are commixed, and his stories become tools to build memories, rather than to preserve them.

His stories are presented in a delectable way to involve people in the national effort to unify Italy. De Amicis distinguishes people in three groups However, general enthusiasm among population for the new fate of Rome is the goal to reach, rather than the genuine representation of an already given fact: Ci fu entusiasmo davvero?

Thus, as ideological as he would appear, he wants to sell enthusiasm, because it is more moving than rigorous thinking. On the one hand, De Amicis reassures his reader that the unification process is not determined to suppress the Catholic Church. De Amicis reassures the woman: More than on papal Rome, the new Italian capital will have to be modeled on the classical one. Rather than Catholic churches and altars built by popes to redefine the symbolic value of public spaces, the open-air monuments of Ancient Rome should inspire politicians and common people to shape the new secular Italian capital city.

However, the Italian national army, as opposed to the papal one, is presented as the embodiment of a national unity that, while preserving the variety of idioms and characters, is able to move with one heart and mind: Similarly, there is no reference to Roman Jews still obliged to live in the Ghetto, although most of them interpreted the breach of Porta Pia as a messianic event. U of Nebraska P, This is how Mantegazza imagined life to be in the year The Isle of Experiments comprises other little states, such as Poligama where men have many wives , Polyandra where women have many husbands , Cenobia where men live in ascetism , Monachia where nuns are devoted to the cult of Sappho and, finally, Peruvia where life is modeled on the ancient socialist regime of the Incan Empire.

A Dream is a book that bespeaks more of its own era than of the future it purports to unveil. Utopia, and Antonio Ghislanzoni Abrakadabra. A Dream constitutes an important addition to the relatively small number of nineteenth-century Italian novels available in English and is an invaluable text to add to any class, whether within a comparative context or not, teaching nineteenth-century Italian literature.

La parola scritta e pronunciata. Nuovi saggi sulla narrativa di Vincenzo Consolo. San Cesario di Lecce: I vari contributi, disposti cronologicamente a seconda del testo di cui si occupano, sono chiusi da un saggio dello stesso Consolo che, per la sua pregnanza di significati ed allusioni ne arricchisce il volume. Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture. Nella seconda sezione, gli interventi si concentrano sul rapporto tra alcuni modelli teorici o aspetti concettuali e il pensiero postmoderno.

Alessia Ronchetti, invece, analizza il postmodernismo alla luce della scuola italiana della differenza sessuale, basando le proprie riflessioni sui lavori di Luisa Muraro e Adriana Cavarero.

Il volume, attraverso i suoi quattordici interventi, affronta in maniera molto seria una questione fondamentale di tutta la letteratura e del postmoderno in particolare: Domande di comprensione e suggerimenti per la discussione in classe seguono ogni sezione di testo. Gli studenti possono anche consultare due appendici, che offrono una selezione di saggi, racconti e testimonianze, a illustrazione delle problematiche precedentemente toccate. Anche in questi capitoli, Bartalesi-Graf integra la propria sintesi storico-sociale con testimonianze documentarie, tra le quali interviste da lei condotte in Basilicata nel A Levi e alla sua opera sono dedicati i tre capitoli centrali.

Laddove opportuno, le schede contengono indicazioni per considerazioni inter-testuali rispetto al Cristo oppure ad altri quadri. Il capitolo si chiude con due sezioni dedicate ad argomenti di ricerca e discussione, e con una breve ma completa bibliografia e lista di siti internet dove trovare riproduzioni dei dipinti di Levi. Il capitolo si sofferma soprattutto sul confronto tra il testo e il film, approfondendone poi alcune tematiche comuni.

I testi nelle appendici, inoltre, permettono di ascoltare, oltre a quella di Levi, altre voci dal sud. Italian Travel Writing Between the Wars. Remapping Cultural History 7. While connected by these concerns, each chapter in Journeys through Fascism is nonetheless fairly autonomous, not simply with regard to the geographical region under consideration, but also in terms of the kind of writer examined and, to some extent, the critical approach adopted.

Wisely, Burdett restricts the scope of his study in a number of ways: Geographical displacement is often accompanied by a sense of temporal displacement. Moreover, as Burdett suggests, Journeys through Fascism may well provide stimulus for future research in a number of disciplines: This important work certainly points toward other complimentary areas of research, including the broader phenomenon of domestic and foreign tourism among the general public already examined by Richard Bosworth.

Italian Comics of the s and s. UP of Mississippi, The number of rigorous, book-length studies devoted to the critical evaluation of comics can scarcely fill one shelf in an average-sized bookcase. Although the study of comics is beginning to gain the status that the study of cinema attained on university campuses in the s, the volume of scholarship is playing catch- up. Italian Comics of the s and s represents the still rare effort that focuses on a relatively narrow part of national, aesthetic, and cultural comics history, and for that reason alone is a welcome addition to the field.

In his first section, Castaldi discusses the post-war Italian comics that tended to feature adventure stories, or riffs on American genres such as the western, that were produced primarily with a younger audience in mind. As Castaldi notes, the artistic quality of these comics varied widely. The magazine also routinely carried American strips, such as Peanuts, along with the left-leaning strips Pogo and Doonesbury.

He points to the introduction of the independently published Cannibale in the spring of as the beginning of new adult comics. Additionally, the comic addressed contemporary issues often as they were happening that few publications and certainly no other comics were featuring, including drug addiction and homosexuality. The most popular of all adult comics, Il male, began in February The comic which carried Cannibale as a supplement until it stopped publishing was overwhelmingly satirical in tone, adhering to no strict political line other than to attack any dominant value or convention of the era.

Il male reached the peak of its popularity during the Moro kidnapping. Cannibale, which ceased publishing after nine issues, resurfaced in late as the less political Frigidaire. It found an audience in a generation tired of the political slant of the previous decade by embracing characteristics of the Italian high-post-modernist phase in the s. This dilemma makes the third section, in which Castaldi provides thorough evaluations of key artists and writers, all the more essential.

I found myself on Amazon, searching in vain for the work of Pazienza, Tamburini, the Valvoline Group, and others mentioned by Castaldi, and had no luck with the exception of the occasional used copy, usually in Italian. Hopefully, Drawn and Dangerous will inspire a new and heightened interest in these artists, leading to greater awareness and availability of their works in the U.

Viaggio nella narrativa sperimentale italiana del XX secolo. Ma Scrivere contro si segnala soprattutto per la coerenza del metodo. Decisamente un ottimo lavoro questo di Paolo Cherchi e Cosetta Seno Reed che proprio nel carattere divulgativo del progetto ha il suo maggior pregio. Anzi proprio la grande fortuna della gastronomia, secondo quanto ricostruiscono Paolo Cherchi e Cosetta Seno Reed, sembra ricucire quella cesura originaria di due formati, di due culture, di due Italie divise.

I vocaboli sono divisi per campi semantici di appartenenza abbigliamento, alcolici, architettura, ecc. Sono fornite anche informazioni sulla specie grammaticale e notizie sulla storia dei termini e sulle eventuali mediazioni o interferenze con altre lingue. Quali previsioni si possono fare?

Quali saranno i prossimi italianismi che entreranno ad ogni diritto nel vocabolario inglese per rimanervi? Se lo chiedono i due autori del volume e non hanno dubbi: Due to these circumstances, the notion of italicity must be expanded beyond the borders of the Italian peninsula to include a transnational network of people who are connected with or interested in Italian culture.

Italian Bookshelf According to the author, the catalyst of this movement was the increased possibility of communicating and traveling at a low cost. The benefit of this new and more inclusive definition of citizenship is that it will allow Italy to claim a more significant role in the international arena and to incorporate into Italian culture the richness of a transnational network of experiences.

Notwithstanding the interesting premises offered by Bassetti, however, a question remains unanswered: Does this category include everyone who has ever been interested in Italian culture? Or does membership demand some type of accompanying action? It should be noted, however, that despite numerous examples throughout the text, a solid definition of the new Italic is absent. Interestingly enough, an Italic shares a passion for Italian culture, as does the readership of the magazine in which these articles first appeared.

Despite the necessity of acknowledging the growing importance of Italophiles outside the borders and the increasing interest in Italy culture outside the peninsula, the theorization of this network lacks a real rigor, and thus the category becomes much too broad: If an Italic is simply someone with a strong interest in Italian culture, can we include people who strive to migrate to Italy? If so, how should those Italics be included? Their inclusion within or exclusion from the paradigm expands the basis for debate, and would have enriched this work significantly.

Italic Lessons, when read together with Italici, represents a stimulating introduction to the study of the concept of citizenship in Italy. With the approach of the year-anniversary of Italian Unification, the number of publications regarding this topic has vastly increased. To orient oneself in relation to this vast literary corpus, the two texts constitute a conversational introduction that covers a vast range of contemporary issues in a captivating style.

The publishing house itself was founded in as a non-profit publisher of the semi-annual magazine Voices in Italian Americana, dedicated to Italian American Literature and cultures, as well as the periodical Italiana, devoted to Italian language writing in the United States. The Crossings series was established in to promote works just like this volume by Leonilde Frieri Ruberto.

Italian Bookshelf Leonilde Frieri was born in in the small town of Cairano in the Avellino province of Campania. Having completed the fourth grade, she eventually followed her husband to America with her four children in These memoirs were recorded at the prompting of one of her daughters following the Irpinia earthquake that destroyed more than half of her village. Ruberto, is the principal translator of this memoir, although several family members contributed along the way as well. Also, Ilaria Serra, an assistant professor at Florida Atlantic University, wrote the introduction to this work.

The preface, composed by Ruberto, explains that Frieri wrote eighty pages over two weeks in while her husband was visiting Cairano and she stayed with her daughters on Long Island. Written in cursive and in a mix of standard Italian, the Cairanese dialect, and a smattering of English, Ruberto translated these pages between and The introduction by Ilaria Serra provides information on several aspects that are particular to this type of work.

First of all she provides some background on the rarity of immigrant biographies, particularly those written by women. Furthermore, she highlights that 14 of the 19 different dates used to situate the events historically are related directly to family events while only 5 are world historical events such as wars. The text, indeed, does flow like a river. In the 46 pages of prose, there are only 44 sentences and most of those hold no grammatical correctness.

In the Italian, which occupies the second half of the book, the reader notices that there are major stylistic and grammatical inconsistencies. For example, there is no standard capitalization of words, many spelling errors since most words are spelled phonetically, no accents, a lack of agreement and a distinct lack of appropriate punctuation. In the English translation, Laura Ruberto was faithful to the original composition only altering spelling and grammatical correctness to allow the sentences to make sense to the reader.

Another particularly interesting element is the emotional detachment that permeates much of the text. The author seems to have very little emotional investment in so many of the events in her life. The majority of this memoir is focused on the daily activities and goings-on of a small rural Italian village.

The only elements about which the reader will note any particular emotional reaction pertain to the family, to which Frieri is fiercely dedicated. Of her life in America, she explains that she did everything a good wife should: It seems that that sadness also defined America for the author since America never held any of the beauty or happiness or familial tradition that Italy held for her.

It is written as if a grandchild suddenly turned to her and asked if she too played this game as a child and the response was recorded on paper. Part of the brilliance of this work is the lack of planning, a lack of attention to what to include and what to omit, and a lack of attention to chronological accuracy. This is an authentic account of life after Italy. Laura Ruberto has produced an incredibly faithful translation of the original text, while Ilaria Serra has created an introduction that provides the necessary background information for a reader to appreciate the nuance not only in the story but in the relationship of this memoir to this particularly genre of literature.

Performing the Life of Black Migrants to Italy. In the preface to his work, Furno provides a broad discussion on how categories of identity, race, migration, and especially intra-ethnic relations shape the work of the Albe performers. Furno also devotes a few paragraphs to making a case for the importance of the work of the Albe. In other words, the stage-work of the company offers migrants the possibility for cultural agency and self-affirmation, empowering them to voice their presence and rights in the destination culture. Furno argues that whereas up to the Renaissance, Catholicism was generally accepting of black Africans as human beings capable of participating in the grace of God through the evangelical project, during the late Renaissance race became part of a utilitarian policy that legitimated world colonization while justifying racial subjugation.

For Furno, this missed opportunity is reflected in the generalized perception towards blackness of contemporary Italian media. By featuring the black actor Awa Niang in the role of Arlecchino, I ventidue infortuni short-circuits racial boundaries and questions easy constructions of blackness versus whiteness but also of dominating and dominated, central and peripheral, mainstream and marginal.

The multiple concerns of this play indicate how in Ruh the connections between Africa and Romagna were still at an embryonic stage. The remainder of the chapter discusses the work of the first Senegalese actors who collaborated with the Albe. The reader learns that they were street vendors who eventually left the company to go back to more profitable work.

According to Furno, this episode was a watershed in the public perception of migration inasmuch as Italian culture was forced to acknowledge the reality of migrants and embark on a political debate about racism in Italy and the inhuman living conditions of many immigrants. Despite the significance of nationally televised broadcasts such as Nonsolonero, Un mondo a colori, Shukran, and the two columns from La Repubblica, Metropolis and Gli altri noi, mainstream media continue to present migration as a temporary state of emergency rather than a reality that demands a reassessment of the Italian juridical system.

Furno also dwells at length on the erosion of a social welfare system that widens the gap between the wealthy and the poor. The multiple sites of the performances and the dispersed models of social engagement and solidarity that the play creates in the mind of the spectators are interpreted by Furno as the only strategies to resist a power that, in an era of globalization, has become dislocated and de-territorialized. Dalle avventure ai miracoli. Massimo Bontempelli fra narrativa e metanarrativa. Fifty years after his death, Massimo Bontempelli remains a somewhat under- recognized figure in the landscape of Italian modernism.

While there are several studies that offer a panoramic view of his life and literary production, much still remains to be done when it comes to the investigation of individual works. As she rightly argues, the prose works of this period are characterized by the proliferation of self-referential and meta-narrative devices — something that has been noted in passing by several critics but never seriously analyzed in detail. The book is divided into six chapters, preceded by a short theoretical introduction on the notion of meta-narrative. In the remaining five chapters, one or more meta-narrative devices or strategies are discussed in relation to a specific work.

Indeed, Giordano is at her best when, as here, she engages in the close reading of individual texts.

Less convincing, on the contrary, is her use of theoretical material. The subject of chapter four is the novella La scacchiera davanti allo specchio Writing, like the ludic activity of children, involves the construction of a fictional world that interprets and re-invents reality in a creative and playful way. By identifying in Eva ultima some typical anti-realist motifs of this second kind of magic realism — the carnival spirit, the enchanted journey, primitivism etc.

Dalle avventure ai miracoli is not without problems. In places, it reads a bit too much like the doctoral thesis from which it seems to be derived, especially in its over-reliance on secondary sources, profusely quoted at the expense of a more personal elaboration of the material. Finally, the book would have benefited from a more careful editing, as there are numerous grammatical and lexical infelicities as well formal inconsistencies that suggest a somewhat rushed production it is not clear, for instance, why bibliographical references are sometimes given in an endnote and sometimes included parenthetically directly in the text.

On the positive side, this book makes a useful contribution to our understanding of Bontempelli and, more in general, of that middle-brow experimentalism on the border between the transgressive spirit of the avant- garde and the orthodoxy of the realist mainstream that characterizes the s. In other words, far from being an eccentric writer of sophisticated fables, Bontempelli in fact emerges here as a forerunner of much of post-modern fiction, of which he anticipated a number of central themes and concerns.

Image, Eye and Art in Calvino. A questo scopo Martin McLaughlin privilegia Gli amori difficili, raccolta finora fin troppo poco studiata. Margarethe Hagen porta alla ribalta che le Cosmicomiche contengono due racconti che costituiscono una riscrittura del mito di Orfeo da prospettive diametralmente opposte.

Si riposizionano in modo irrevocabile la figura del narratore, quella del lettore, ma anche il testo stesso. La parte successiva, dal titolo Arte,contiene tre capitoli relativi alla pittura. Ne testimonia la scelta delle varie copertine che entrano in una dialettica con il discorso narrativo o altro. Maria Pia De Paulis-Dalembert. Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, Esso fa seguito a un convegno sulla letteratura poliziesca italiana tenutosi nel alla Sorbona, organizzato dal C. Da questi punti di partenza si sviluppano i saggi che compongono la raccolta. Pie Peter Lang, Le storie di De Cataldo offrono dunque spunti talmente interessanti da far pensare che le ipotesi avanzate nella finzione letteraria possano portare a delle utili conclusioni nella vita reale.

Somigli si sofferma sui gialli storici di Loriano Macchiavelli, sottolineando come essi non redimano gli errori del passato ma anzi li presentino come cause principali dei problemi del presente. La De Paulis si sofferma sul modo in cui Corrado Augias ha rappresentato in Quella mattina di Luglio il bombardamento, avvenuto nel , del quartiere San Lorenzo a Roma. Chirumbolo si esprime invece con toni critici nei confronti di chi, come Giampaolo Pansa, negli ultimi anni ha sottolineato il lato oscuro della lotta partigiana.

Per Alessia Risi il problema di trovare una memoria collettiva presenta aspetti di carattere storico, ma anche sociale e geografico. Per De Boer caricare di nuova suspense un fatto passato ne riapre le interpretazioni, svolgendo dunque un ruolo fondamentale nel modo di relazionarsi con la storia. Civitella in Val di Chiana AR: These poets include T. Eliot and Giuseppe Ungaretti, indubitably canonical figures in any discussion regarding text-life relationships. This book establishes a number of fundamental problems involved in defining autobiographical poetry, particularly in the Italian and English traditions.

At the same time, because of its limited space, the volume cannot offer a systematic treatment of the topic, a task that a larger-scale study might aim to undertake. Bulzoni, , is another defining feature of the lyric subject at hand, one to which a broader study on this issue might potentially pay further attention. Divided in two sections, the volume could have developed a greater cohesion in its two parts.

The study is clearly a stimulating introduction to the topic, so much so that readers might wish for a more in-depth analysis of the myriad reactions of the contemporary interviewees, whose answers display a range of responses, from the comprehensive and incisive e. Certain Italian models of the lyric tradition, such as Dante and Petrarch, constitute a consistent point of reference in the interviews in the second section e. Notions of performativity and gender such as in the work of Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero might also have been used to greater effect in the volume, which, because of its brevity, cannot deal in depth with questions of gender, race or sexuality, and the implications of these issues for a poetic mode of self-representation.

These theorists, who are mentioned in passing both by Lerro himself in the theoretical introduction, and by a number of the interviewees, are by necessity situated outside the scope of the volume, and yet they might prove interesting critical touchstones for a larger and more exhaustive study. Given the brevity of the volume, one cannot quibble with the limitations of the final bibliography, or the few entries from unexpected sources, including online encyclopedias and dictionaries. Bulzoni, , and Il testo autobiografico nel Novecento ed.

Reimar Klein and Rossana Bonadei, Milano: Guerini e Associati, might have proved stimulating points of reference. Studies in Italian Americana 2. This anthology is the English translation of the Italian book previously published as Quei bravi ragazzi, Il cinema italoamericano contemporaneo Venezia: Marsilio Editori, , edited by Muscio and Spagnoletti.

Its purpose is to study how Italian immigrants and their descendants use film as a means to address issues of identity, and examines the representation of Italian Americans in film, as well as their contributions as directors, screenwriters and actors. She summarizes the cultural history of the children of the motherland as she reviews the different stages of Italian assimilation in the United States: The first group contributed to the world of entertainment through maintaining traditions common to Italian popular theater.

Furthermore, they were granted unrestricted access by immigration officers if they declared themselves musicians and actors. Muscio reviews the conditions that led to the Southern Italian immigration to North America which had different conditions and consequences for the cohort that immigrated to South America , and the negative stereotypes and myths that emerged and labeled them instinctive, passionate, violent, and with ties to the Mafia.

The outbreak of World War II made Italians enemies in their new homeland, and in their self-defense led to the erasure of their cultural heritage. A new generation of directors emerged in the s: Many of these documentaries focus on religious processions and rituals and with their rich anthropological content, form a genre all their own.

Pointing to the achievements of the Italian American community, Muscio quotes statistics from the U. Between Ethnic Identity and the Racial Question. Notwithstanding, nearly three quarters of the U. Grifitth is a name often quoted as responsible for early movies that helped to spread this stereotype in films such as The Cord of Life , At the Altar , In Little Italy , and The Coming of Angelo There are twenty-one essays written by Italian and United States scholars who discuss the primary indicators of Italian-American identity as manifested in its music, religion, food, family and work ethic and how these traits are reflected in film and other arts.

Issues concerning negative stereotyping and defamation of images of Italian Americans in film and racism prompted by widely acclaimed and influential films such as The Godfather and highly rated television series such as The Sopranos problematize the depiction of Italian Americans in the media. The conversation concerning Italian American stereotyping continues, and attempts to redress the gangster images often fail.

I contributi, di autori italiani e stranieri, hanno il pregio di toccare numerose zone del dibattito che, allora come oggi, continua a svilupparsi attorno al principale gruppo culturale del nostro secondo Novecento. In che modo un Gruppo che si vuole avanguardistico costruisce il proprio discorso critico? Rebbecca West, infine, si concentra su una figura ancora molto marginalizzata dalla critica, quella di Giulia Niccolai.

In his work Paratexts: Surrounding and infiltrating the work itself, the paratext, whether located under the same cover as the work or extrinsic to it, informs and contextualizes its reception and, in part, contributes to the generation of its meaning. Amelia Nigro has divided her painstakingly organized study into several large sections, each highlighting a separate strain of Calvinian paratexts. Nigro correctly notes that the preface, then, is an invaluable record of this process of shedding superfluous elements that leads to the creation of a text. Additionally, by enhancing what has already been written within the text proper, the preface confirms that not all has been said, and that Calvino the Editor could continue to generate text and meaning at will according to what he deemed advantageous to his public reception.

Nigro identifies the role of memory as another constant theme. Calvino readily alluded to moments from his past when contextualizing his writing, yet at times — and particularly in several interviews cited by Nigro — he also toyed with the potential authorial pleasure of lying to his audience about the concrete facts of his personal history. Amelia Nigro concludes her analysis with a clear recapitulation of what she has illustrated, but caps it with an image that, perhaps inadvertently, provokes a due measure of sympathy for the shy, stuttering Calvino.

Italian Cinema and Italian Terrorism It includes digressions on critical and theoretical concepts that, while being appropriate to dissertations, are by now part of the scholarly idiom and therefore do not require the lengthy explanations that one often finds here. That said, this newly published English version of Tragedia includes several expanded treatments of the topic, such as discussions of films by Amelio, Rosi, and more recent directors.

The remainder of the preface is devoted to outlining the seven chapters of the book. The chapter concludes with a description of the corpus of films according to categories i. A second section of this chapter focuses on films that commemorate the victims of the right-wing violence that led to the bombings in Brescia and Bologna in and , respectively.

Yet, he finds that the television film Per non dimenticare, by Martelli, overcomes the limits of most commemorative films by providing viewers with portraits of the victims as unique individuals. Thus, the full integration of the trauma of terrorism in the national heritage remains an unfulfilled project.

While the study would have benefited from a more thorough revision of the Italian version, it surveys an impressive corpus of films and, for the most part, makes convincing arguments. As such, this volume will be a useful title to film and cultural studies scholars alike. Polemiche novecentesche, tra letteratura e musica.

Franco Casati Editore, A dieci anni di distanza dalla pubblicazione del suo primo lavoro I generi letterari nella critica italiana del primo Novecento. Servono ancora i generi artistici? Da qui in avanti, abbandonata la musica, Pennings si concentra esclusivamente su fenomeni letterari. In Il paradosso di una retroguardia: Its focus is the impact of films, theatrical, and television programs on Italian political and cultural debates on the Holocaust. What kind of public discussion have such works stimulated and produced? Historical debates and reception of works divide the book matter into eight chapters, the first being the introduction while the last bears the conclusive remarks and ideas for a follow-up.

The other six chapters periodize the history of reception of separate works. Il Generale Della Rovere set in Genoa ranked 8th among the highest-grossing films of the season. He decides to be shot, and he chooses his own punishment for no atonement is possible for his misdeeds and misconduct due to the sin of card games to which he has lost not only the lives of those who were then sent to the camps but also his own soul.

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